KFC Is Now Accepting Bitcoin for Buckets of Fried Chicken

The chain is hungry for hype

Despite warnings from the Oracle of Omaha (and our own common sense), everyone we know is still trying to cash in on Bitcoin-driven hype with embarrassing earnestness. Brands included. (To be fair, the results enjoyed by Long Island Iced Tea—or shall we say Long Blockchain Corp.?—hasn’t helped matters.)

But KFC Canada has found a wily way to ride the coattails while deriding the entire damn concept. With help from agency Grip Limited, meet “The Bitcoin Bucket,” an attempt to convince Canadians to exchange their Bitcoins (thus relieving them) for buckets (of chicken, thus enriching KFC while the going can be got).

Jokingly dubbing it the “crypto-chicken space,” the brand explains the move by writing, “Despite dramatic swings in value, long and short-term volatility, and general confusion around cryptocurrency, the Colonel’s Original Recipe chicken remains constant—it’s finger lickin’ good.”

What better reason to invest in your belly, and not a bubble?

“We’re upgrading the $20 Bucket to the 0.0041 Bitcoin Bucket, or whatever its ever-fluctuating value happens to be at the moment,” the brand wryly continues in an email.

Canadians are invited to visit the brand’s online store, ColonelAndCo.ca, to exchange their digital currency for a bucket of chicken tenders, which would be delivered between Jan. 12 and Jan. 19.

The Bitcoin Bucket started trading at 3 p.m. on Thursday. A Facebook Live video is currently tracking the bucket’s real-time value in Bitcoin:

Inexplicably, they are all sold out. In fact, everything on the store is sold out! (Suspicious.) Which sucks, because you could have scored super cool stuff like this:

Angela Natividad is a frequent contributor to Adweek's creativity blog, AdFreak. She is also the author of Generation Creation and co-founder of Hurrah, an esports agency. She lives in Paris and when she isn't writing, she can be found picking food off your plate.